Tenants pay the price as buoyant market continues

The average monthly rent per person in the UK is £706, or £8,472 a year, it has been claimed.

The lowest monthly rent per person location is Swansea at £398.50, and the highest is London at £1,247.63 – even after a slight fall.

The ‘per person’ rent figures, from specialist letting agents’ insurer Endsleigh, were queried by Landlord Today as they seemed so high, but we were told that they were correct as they were based on individual referencing checks carried out by Experian.

Seven of the top ten costliest towns and cities for renters are in the South-East along with Bath, Oxford and Bournemouth, while the ten cheapest are all located in the north of England and Scotland, in addition to Swansea. Tenants across the Midlands also paid less than the national average, with an average monthly rent of £555, according to Endsleigh.

Grant Stevens, the newly appointed general manager of letting services at Endsleigh, said: “Rents in London have been rising for a long time so it is no great surprise that there is finally a cooling in prices.

“However, nationally, year-on-year the picture is one of a very buoyant rental market and, with the overall rise in keeping with inflation, it won’t unduly affect the pockets of either landlords, who are enjoying good yields, or renters, who are able to access a whole range of properties.

“We understand from our letting agent partners that the bigger threat to landlords’ income increasingly comes from repairing damage to property that frequently costs more than the tenant’s deposit. This is often because landlords are relying on standard home insurance that typically won’t cover rented properties.”

Among the towns with the higher average rents per person per month are Watford (£1,060), Guildford (£1,031.96), Slough (£989.24) and Bath (£963.02. The cheapest places include Sunderland (£451.93), Wigan (£475.10) and Doncaster (£478.50).